Books like Why history matters by Gerda Lerner

Bill Bryson turns the universe into a conversational guide, tracing science from the Big Bang through evolution, geology, chemistry, astronomy, and particle physics with humor and clarity.

A compelling overview of American history through the eyes and experiences of its women, workers, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working poor.

Newbery Honor Book National Book Award Finalist

Lijia Zhang, a factory worker, reflects on her disillusionment with China’s socialist ideals.

A historical nonfiction analysis of women's sexual behavior, focusing on nymphomania and other mania, examines social conditions and biographical cases, contextualizing within the broader history of women.

While women's experience encompasses all that is human, while women have participated in history and the making of history through all time, until very recently they have been largely excluded from the writing of that history. Most of what we know of the past experience of women comes to us largely through the distorting lens of men's reflections and observations. In the now classic The Female Experience, Gerda Lerner describes history as seen by women, as colored by their values. What she creates is fascinating narrative of the lives and history of ordinary women, a book that provides a new framework for the study of their past experience. If women's history is now a healthy and ever-growing discipline, we have in a large part this award-winning author to thank. Avoiding the traditional chronological periods by which U.S. history is most often studied, Lerner groups her sources--many taken from manuscripts previously unknown, and others only available in research libraries--according to the lifecycle of women, their roles in a male-defined society, in the workplace, in politics, and finally in the contemporary world where feminism is creating an altogether new consciousness. From "runaway wives" in eighteenth-century America, through an anonymous account of a mother's death during childbirth, to appeals in our century for freedom of sexual preference, The Female Experience recounts history from the woman's point of view, and goes a long way toward reconstructing a female past and analyzing it with appropriate concepts. In the general introduction and chapter essays Lerner offers commentary that not only knits these disparate primary sources together, but also interprets them in an innovative way.

Rafia Zakaria’s memoir follows her family's migration to Karachi, interweaving the city’s social and religious upheavals with the personal tragedy of her aunt, who endures a painful second marriage amid Pakistan’s Islamization era.